Victoria the Queen

Julia Baird's biography of Queen Victoria draws on previously unpublished papers to portray the woman behind the myth of the British Empire's longest-reigning monarch. Born in 1819, fifth in line to the throne, Victoria became queen as a teenager and ruled with a decisive hand through a century of upheaval — the decline of aristocratic privilege, the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of the British Empire.

The book traces her defiance of her mother's control and an adviser's bullying as a girl, her early relish of the crown's freedoms, her marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and the nine children they had together, and her grief after his death. It covers her close, controversial relationship with her servant John Brown in the years that followed, her outspoken dealings with her ministers, and the eight assassination attempts she survived over her reign.

Baird, an Australian journalist and historian, presents Victoria as a more assertive, complicated figure than the popular image of a withdrawn widow — a queen who held real political influence over a quarter of the world's population at the height of imperial Britain.